Factoring Humanity

All she was doing was looking through a twisted lens, a Mobius microscope, a topological telescope.

A hyperscope.

And the hyperscope was allowing her to see the four-dimensional reality that surrounded her quotidian world, a reality she’d been no more aware of than A Square — the hero of Abbott’s Flatland — had been aware of the three-dimensional world surrounding him.

Jung’s metaphor had suggested it long ago, although old Carl had never thought of it in physical terms. But if the collective unconscious was more than just a metaphor, it would have to look something like this: the apparently disparate parts of humanity actually connected at a higher level.

Incredible.

If she was right -

If she was right, the Centaurs hadn’t sent information about their alien world. Rather, they’d given humanity a mirror so that humans could finally see themselves.

And Heather was now looking at a portion of that mirror, a close-up — a few thousand minds packed in front of her.

Heather rotated around, scanning the vast surface of the bowl. She couldn’t make out discrete hexagons in the distance — but she could see that colored spots made up only a tiny fraction of the total. Perhaps five or ten percent.

Five or ten percent…

She’d read years ago that the total number of human beings who had ever existed — whether habilis, erectus, neanderthalensis, or sapiens — was about one hundred billion.

Five or ten percent.

Seven billion human beings currently alive.

And ninety-three billion, more or less, who had come and gone before.

The overmind didn’t reduce, reuse, and recycle. Rather, it maintained all the previous hexagons, dark and pristine, untouched and immutable.

And then it hit her.

Staggering…

And yet it must be here.

She felt flush, felt faint.

She’d found what she’d wanted.

Since sophisticated consciousness had first arisen, lo those millions of years ago, some hundred billion extensions of it — some hundred billion humans — had been born and died on planet Earth.

And they were still represented here, each a hexagon.

And what was a man or a woman but the sum of his or her memories? What else of value could the hexagons possibly store? Why keep the old ones around, unless -

It made her giddy, the very idea.

Who to access first? If she could touch only one mind, which would it be?

Christ?

Or Einstein?

Socrates?

Or Cleopatra?

Stephen Hawking?

Or Marie Curie?

Or — she’d been suppressing it, of course — or her dead daughter Mary?

Or even Heather’s own dead father?

Who? Where would one begin?

As Heather watched, an arc of light connected one of the colored hexagons to one that was dark. There was a way to use this vast switchboard, to interface a living mind with the archive of one dead.

Did such arcs happen spontaneously? Did they explain such things as people thinking they’d lived before? Heather had never believed in past-life regression, but a fistula in — in — in psychospace, bridging a dead mind and one still active, might very well be interpreted as a past life by the active mind, unaware of what was going on.

As she watched, the arc disappeared; whatever contact there had been, for whatever purpose, had been fleeting, and now it was over.

The passive hexagon had never lit up; it was dead throughout the access. Heather was seeing the best representation her mind could produce of the four-dimensional realm in which the overmind dwelt, but the fourth dimension, as the Web articles she’d read had said, wasn’t time; it did not link the living and the dead interactively.

Heather rotated again, turning back to the vast sunflower of active hexagons.

One of them — one out of seven billion — was her, a cross section through her extension into threespace.

But which one? Was she nearby or far away? Surely the connections were more complex than this representation suggested. Surely, like neurons in an individual human brain, the connections were multilayered. This was merely one way — one vastly simplified way — of looking at the gestalt of human consciousness.

But if she was there — and she must be — then…

No, not Christ.

Not Einstein.

Not poor, dead Mary.

Not her own father.

No, the first mind Heather wanted to touch was one still alive, one still active, one still feeling, one still experiencing.

She had indeed found it.

The off-site storage.

The backup.

The archive.

One of those hexagons represented Kyle.

If she could find it, if she could access it, then she would know.

One way or the other, she would finally know.

23

The door chime in Kyle’s lab sounded. He got up from the chair in front of Cheetah’s console and moved toward the entrance. The door slid open as he approached.

A tall, angular white man was standing in the curving corridor. “Professor Graves?” he said.

“Yes?” said Kyle.

“Simon Cash,” said the man. “Thank you for agreeing to see me.”